mollie-ga,
You don't mention what version of Power Point you are using. I am
assuming that you are using Power Point 2002 (WinXP) and either
Windows XP or Windows 2000 as every site I visited stated that
Producer will not work on previous versions. Producer is a free plug
in offered by Microsoft to enable Power Point 2002 to utilize HTML,
video, graphic and sound files within the Power Point Slide
presentation.
Do you have the system minimum requirements - 600MHz Pentium class
processor; 128Mb of Ram; Windows 2000/XP, Office XP; video/audio
capture devices; 2Gb of hard disk space for video (20Gb recommended)?
Have you tried the same image in Power Point without using Producer?
Did you check whether your selected images were to be sized by pixels
or by "real" size. Try setting it to pixels (slide--> image) and start
with a size of 150 x 150 and work up/down from there. Check the
resolution value as well....it may be set too low. You will have to
experiment here. For still images, do you need to use "Producer" ? My
impression was that it is primarily for video and sound files. Maybe
"Producer" is the culprit here and not Power Point itself.
Are you exporting the images in Image Exporter from within Power
Point? I have found that this is a "bug" in the program. This site
discusses it a bit, and ofers a "tool" for sale to help work around
it. It IS for PP '97, though. Interesting to read however.
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptools/FAQ00005.htm
If the answers to the above are yes, then I am wondering if you
perhaps resized the images either before you placed them into your
presentation, or after they were placed. If you resized them
excessively, there will be poor resolution. There is quite a lot to
understand about different graphic files, DPI (dots per inch), PPI
(pixels per inch), raster images, sizing, and how Power Point handles
all this. I'll attempt to explain this, but the following site does an
excellent job, plus offers free downloadable graphics to "test" your
system with various sizes and file types.
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00075.htm
Raster graphics are made up of small small dots called as Pixels.
Vector graphics are made up of lines based on mathematical
formulas.If you try to enlarge or scale raster graphics beyond a
certain limit, you loose some quality resulting in jaggies. This
happens because the number of pixels stays constant, they just get
larger in size. For an example of "jaggies" visit this site, and
scroll to the bottom of the page.Vector graphics remain the same no
matter how much you stretch or scale them from the original size.
http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~joshagam/Solace/SOLACE/scrnshots/fsaa.html
Furthur, formats such as .jpg a.k.a .jpeg compression is considered
a "lossy" format, meaning each time the graphic is opened and saved,
image information is lost. To save space, the file is compressed. This
is achieved by discarding some "unimportant" information, as color
information. After the second and third time an image is opened and
saved, you will get image degredation, as the discarded information
can't be retrieved. This does not happen in .gif, or .png formats,
which are called "lossless" compressed format. Many times graphics
start out as one format, and are saved in another to prevent loss.
You are probably thinking this graphics issue is complicated, and it
is. I have worked with them for some time, and I am still baffled by
the graphics enigma. Most of the higher end graphics programs such as
Adobe PhotoShop
( http://www.adobe.com/main.html ) ,
Corel PhotoPaint( http://www3.corel.com/ )
and Macromedia Freehand( http://macromedia.com/ ) allow you to
convert and/or export a graphic from one format to another. Another
good graphics program that utilizes the .png format, as well as .jpeg,
.gif and others, and is reasonably priced is JASC PaintShop Pro(
http://jasc.com/ ).You can download free trial versions and see how
you like them.
For extra information about Producer and Power Point, visit these
sites:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/powerpoint/producer/ProdDepGd.doc
http://www.vnunet.com/Products/Software/1131939
For extra information on graphics formats and "jaggies" vist these
sites:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/Activity
http://www.widearea.co.uk/designer/compress.html
You may want to consider visiting Microsoft's own newsgroup for
Producer support. Once there, look along the left margin for the
available newsgroups, and click onto the "+" in front of PowerPoint,
then click onto "Producer" from the pop-up menu. The site's address is
http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.asp?icp=prod_office
I found this semi-related question on MS Producer forum: "is there a
filesize-limit of the background images in producer 1.1? Strange
things happen here, I used a 1024x768 background .jpg with very low
compression, more than 550kb in size. The producer preview doesn't
show anything (not even media player controls, anything). After
increasing the compression and pushing the filesize to 150kb
everything shows up fine... ". It was posted just a short time ago,
and as yet there is no answer....maybe when you check there will be a
response, or if I see it first, I will post it as a comment.
mollie, I am hoping this aswers your question. I am curious as to
whether you tried resizing the graphics down, to a smaller size and if
it helped. Also I'd like to know if you resized the same graphics up
to a larger size. I could find no mention of your exact problem
anywhere, so it seems it is a matter of sizing and/or graphic quality.
I will post the answer to the fellow above's question of background
image file size if and when someone responds. Please let me know if
this information was beneficial!
Regards, crabcakes-ga |
